9 states, DC get $3.4B in ‘Race to the Top’ grants, By Dorie Turner (AP), August 24, 2010, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “More than 13 million students and 1 million educators will share $3.4 billion from the second round of the federal ‘Race to the Top’ grant competition, the U.S. Education Department said Tuesday. The department chose nine states - Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island - and the District of Columbia for the grants. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said 25,000 schools will get money to raise student learning and close the achievement gap. The ‘Race to the Top’ program, part of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, rewards states for taking up ambitious changes to improve struggling schools. The competition instigated a wave of reforms across the country, as states passed new teacher accountability policies and lifted caps on charter schools to boost their chances of winning…”

Children of Katrina still are suffering, By Janet McConnaughey and Lindsey Tanner (AP), August 24, 2010, Detroit Free Press: “A startling number of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina still have serious emotional or behavioral problems five years later, a new study found. More than one in three children studied — those forced to flee their homes because of the August 2005 storm — have been diagnosed since then with mental health problems. These are children who moved to trailer parks and other emergency housing. Nearly half of the families studied still report household instability, researchers said. ‘If children are bellwethers of recovery, then the social systems supporting affected gulf coast populations are still far from having recovered from Hurricane Katrina,’ the researchers said. The study was published online Monday in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Lead author David Abramson of Columbia University in New York said researchers were astonished by the level of distress…”

GAMC health plan hits new snag, By Warren Wolfe, August 23, 2010, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: “State officials said Monday they might retool the payment formula for hospitals participating in an experimental new health plan for some of the state’s poorest residents — a further sign that the revised General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) program launched last spring is not working out the way authorities had hoped. The discussions began because Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis has had a smaller percentage of potential patients enroll than the other three participating hospitals and, as a result, is getting paid more than twice the amount per patient…”

Rural hospitals face challenges across the state, By Charles Oliver, August 22, 2010, Dalton Daily Citizen: “The economic downturn, cuts in state and federal health care programs, and attempts by private businesses to rein in their own health care costs have combined to create a ‘perfect storm’ that threatens small rural hospitals across the state, according to Jimmy Lewis, CEO of HomeTown Health, which represents 55 rural hospitals in Georgia including Murray Medical Center. ‘We could wake up tomorrow and have 10 hospitals about to close,’ said Lewis. Forty-one Georgia hospitals have closed since 1980, according to the Georgia Hospital Association, many of them small rural hospitals. The problem that rural hospitals face is that their ‘payer mix’ is typically heavy in patients on Medicare and Medicaid and those without insurance…”

• Economy led to cuts in use of health care, By Robert Pear, August 16, 2010, New York Times: “The economic crisis in the United States has reduced the use of routine medical care, and the cutbacks here are much deeper than in countries with universal health care systems, researchers say in a new report. The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds that ‘Americans, who face higher out-of-pocket health care costs, have reduced their routine medical care’ much more than people in Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Individuals and families in all five countries lost income because of unemployment and lost wealth because of steep declines in stock prices…”
• 8.4 million Californians lack health coverage as the ranks of the uninsured swell, study finds, By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, August 23, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “The number of Californians who lost jobs and health insurance probably increased in every county last year, according to a study released Monday by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. The new analysis found that 37 counties — including Imperial, Kern and Shasta — had uninsured rates above the statewide average of 24.3%. ‘Different parts of the state were more adversely impacted than others, but really it is spread across the state,’ said one of the study’s authors, Shana Alex Lavarreda, the center’s director of health insurance studies. ‘You have counties from Kern to Shasta that were hit very hard with averages over what we saw in Los Angeles,’ she added. The report backs up the findings of a previous study the center released in March that showed nearly one in four Californians lack health insurance. According to the latest estimates, the state’s uninsured population has reached 24.3%, or about 8.4 million, up from 6.4 million in 2007…”
• 85,000 lost health insurance in Sacramento area, UCLA study finds, By Bobby Caina Calvan, August 24, 2010, Sacramento Bee: “Researchers issued yet another grim statistic Monday on the toll of the recession: 2 million additional Californians - 85,000 of them in the capital region - lost their health care coverage during the recent economic slide. As a result, difficult decisions are playing out in living rooms and across kitchen tables as families struggle with joblessness and tighter finances, according to the authors of a new UCLA study that gives a county-by-county account of the state’s swelling numbers of uninsured, now estimated at 8 million. In Sacramento County, 17.6 percent of the non-elderly population went uninsured at some point last year, compared with 13.1 percent in 2007. In two years, the ranks of the county’s uninsured climbed by 63,000 people - bringing the total to more than 224,000, according to the study by the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Health Policy Research…”